Resumo de Hitler - Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw
Professor Sir Ian Kershaw (born April 29 1943 Oldham, England) is a British historian, noted for his biographies of Adolf Hitler. Originally trained as a medievalist, Kershaw turned to studying German history in the 1970s. He is a professor at the University of Sheffield and is the leading disciple of the late West German historian Martin Broszat, whose theories have had much influence on Kershaw.
Bavaria Project
In the 1970s, Kershaw worked on Broszat's Bavaria Project, which resulted in his first book on the Third Reich, The Hitler Myth. Image and Reality in the Third Reich which was first published in German in 1980 as Der Hitler-Mythos : Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich. This book examined the Hitler cult in Germany, how it was developed by Joseph Goebbels, what social groups the Hitler cult appealed to, and how the Hitler cult rose and fell.
Also resulting from the Bavaria Project was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. In this 1983 book, Kershaw examined the experience of the Third Reich at the grass-roots level in Bavaria. In this book, Kershaw scrutinized how ordinary people reacted to the Nazi dictatorship, looking at how people conformed to the regime and to the extent and limits of dissent. In this book, Kershaw concluded that the majority of Bavarians were anti-Semitic and had no sympathy for the Jews. However, Kershaw also concluded that there was a quantum difference between the anti-Semitism of the majority of ordinary people, who merely disliked Jews and the radical anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews. Kershaw documented numerous campaigns on the part of the Nazi Party to increase the level of anti-semitic hatred. Overall, Kershaw noted that the general popular mood towards the Jews was one of indifference to their fate. Kershaw made the notable claim that the ...the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference, not hatred.
Structuralist views
Like Broszat, Kershaw is a structuralist and sees the structures of the Nazi state as being far more important than the personality of Hitler, or any other individual for that matter, as explanation for the way Nazi Germany developed. In particular, Kershaw agrees with the view argued by Broszat and Hans Mommsen that Nazi Germany was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies locked into perpetual power struggles with each other. For Kershaw, the real significance of Hitler lies in not in himself, but rather in how the German people saw him. Indeed, in his biography of Hitler, Kershaw presented him as the ultimate unperson, a boring, pedestrian man devoid of even the negative greatness attributed to him by Joachim Fest. Kershaw has no time for the Great Man theory of history, and has criticized those who seek to explain everything that happened in the Third Reich as the result of Hitler?s will and intentions. Kershaw?s biography of Hitler is an examination of Hitler?s power, namely how he obtained it and how he maintained it. Kershaw has argued that Hitler's leadership is a model example of Max Weber's theory of Charismatic leadership.
Opposition to Weak Dictator Thesis
Kershaw has expressed disagreement with Broszat's Weak Dictator thesis, namely the idea that Hitler was a relatively unimportant player in the Third Reich, but has agreed with his idea that Hitler did not play much of an role in the day-to-day administration of Nazi Germany. Kershaw's way of explaining this paradox is his theory of Working Towards the Führer, the phase being taken from a 1934 speech by a Prussian civil servant. Kershaw has argued that in Nazi Germany, officials of both the German state and Nazi Party bureaucracy usually took the initiative in beginning policy to meet Hitler's perceived wishes. Through Kershaw does argee that Hitler did possess the powers that the Master of the Third Reich thesis championed by Karl Dietrich Bracher would suggest, Kershaw has argued that Hitler was a Lazy Dictator who did not have the interest to involve himself much in the daily running of Nazi Germany. The only exceptions were the areas of foreign policy and military decisions, both areas that Hitler increasing involved himself in from the late 1930s on. All other areas of policy-making Hitler had little interest in. In Kershaw's view, Hitler largely left policy-making outside of foreign policy and military matters to his subordinates.
Thus, for Kershaw Nazi Germany was both a moncracy (rule of one) and polycracy (rule of many). Hitler held absolute power, but did not choose to exercise it very much; on a daily basis, the rival fiefdoms of the Nazi state fought each other and attempted to carry out Hitler's vaguely worded wishes and dimly defined orders by Working Towards the Führer.

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